by Ty Tagami | Aug 4, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Derek Dooley, the football coach and son of legendary Bulldogs leader Vince Dooley, has joined the campaign to unseat Democrat Jon Ossoff from his U.S. Senate seat in Georgia next year.
“Lawlessness, open season on the border, inflation everywhere, woke stuff. That’s what they represent,” Dooley, who is running as a Republican, said on YouTube Monday as he announced his candidacy.
To get to Ossoff, he will have to go through two Georgia congressmen who are already vying for the GOP nomination. U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter from St. Simons was the first to enter the race in the spring after Gov. Brian Kemp, who had been expected to run, said he was out. State Insurance Commissioner John King then joined the fray but suspended his campaign in late July. U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, R-Jackson, then announced his candidacy.
Although Dooley praises President Donald Trump in his video, Democrats noted that he did not vote in multiple elections when Trump was on the ballot. They also attacked Dooley’s professional career.
“This chaotic, crowded Republican primary just got messier with the entrance of failed and fired former Tennessee football coach Derek Dooley, who has failed to live up to his family name throughout his career,” Democratic Party of Georgia Chair Charlie Bailey said Monday. “We’ll see what’s harder for Dooley — answering for a Trump bill that strips health care for 750,000 Georgians, or remembering which SEC team to root for.”
by Ty Tagami | Jul 31, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Cobb County Court Clerk Connie Taylor was indicted Thursday in connection with alleged destruction of documents in 2022, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office said.
The indictment on two counts each of destruction of public records and violation of oath of office stems from allegations that Taylor told an employee to delete government emails and financial records in response to an open records request in October 2022, Carr’s office said.
“Georgians deserve honesty and transparency from their elected officials, and anything less undermines public trust,” Carr said. “Any attempts to conceal or destroy government records are serious allegations that cannot be ignored, and those responsible will be held accountable.”
Taylor’s staff would not put calls through to Taylor or take messages from Capitol Beat Thursday afternoon. On a fourth call, a staffer forwarded the call to a local newspaper in Marietta.
The indictment came after the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the attorney general’s White Collar and Cyber Crime Unit presented evidence to a Cobb County grand jury.
“The intentional destruction of public records is a serious offense that undermines transparency and public trust,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said.
Neither agency disclosed the subject matter of the documents that allegedly were destroyed.
Carr’s office noted that indictments are merely allegations and that Taylor should be presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
It is not the first time Carr has pursued public officials in connection with open records requests. In 2019, his office obtained a conviction against a former press secretary of the City of Atlanta on two counts of violating the Georgia Open Records Act, which is a misdemeanor offense. The press secretary had told a spokesperson for the city’s Watershed Management Department to delay the release of records requested by a local television news station, according to Carr’s office.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 30, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — A former Democratic state representative has entered the election to succeed Republican Chris Carr as attorney general.
Former House Minority Leader Bob Trammell on Wednesday became the first Democrat to announce his candidacy to become the state’s top attorney, saying he wants to “bring about real change” during a tumultuous era.
“At a time when Georgians are feeling the pressures of an erratic economy, corporate corruption, insidious frauds and scams, and the erosion of our rights, Georgians deserve someone who will fight for them,” the Luthersville attorney said.
Carr is running for governor, and the race to succeed him is wide open.
Two Republicans are already competing for the office: state Sen. Brian Strickland, R-McDonough, a lawyer who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee; and Sen. Bill Cowsert, R-Athens, a lawyer who chairs the Senate Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee.
Strickland filed a campaign contribution report on July 8 that showed he had raised $435,000. Cowsert filed one the same day showing he had brought in $531,000. Trammell registered his intent to raise money on July 1 but has not filed a contribution report.
Trammell grew up in Luthersville in Meriwether County and served as county attorney there. He was also the top Democrat in the state House, as minority leader from 2017-2021.
He graduated from the University of Georgia and the University of Virginia School of Law. He and his wife Jenny, a pharmacist, have three children.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Products from marijuana and hemp are either dangerous and should be banned or amazing and should be accessible to those who need and want them, a Georgia House study committee heard Tuesday.
Lawmakers heard conflicting assertions and opinions during their first hearing ahead of possible changes to state policies for medical marijuana and hemp derivatives.
Several parents testified about children who developed schizophrenia after prolonged consumption of high-dose, off-the-shelf products.
“This is the biggest regulatory failure of my lifetime,” testified one mother, who didn’t want to be identified. She said she discovered that her son had a discount code for frequent purchases at one store.
Dr. Colin Murphy, a psychiatrist, testified that increased potency was driving induced psychosis, with fellow critics saying teenagers are especially vulnerable.
But several medical marijuana advocates testified about the relief the plant delivered for pain, allowing them to avoid addictive opioids and other drugs.
“What about the good things about cannabis? Cannabis saved my life,” said Yolanda Bennett, co-founder of the Georgia Medical Cannabis Society who suffers from a hormonal disorder.
The committee is delving into an area of policy that is as complicated as it is divisive.
It is following on stalemated attempts during this year’s General Assembly session to both increase the potency of medical marijuana and ban hemp beverages.
The area is fraught because the federal government classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, making street use illegal. Georgia legalizes distribution with a doctor’s approval.
Yet, hemp, which comes from a related plant species, is legal under a 2018 federal law that allowed the plant to be used for products like rope. That federal law also allowed sales of the intoxicating part of the plant when limited to 3% of the product’s dry weight.
That has led to a hemp boom, from beverages to gummies.
The market is further complicated by synthetic derivatives that are not regulated. Last fall, the Georgia Department of Agriculture began focused regulatory enforcement of legal hemp regulations, but it was a largely unenforced area before then.
Katherine Russell, the agency’s policy director, said the industry is difficult to regulate because it is quickly evolving. She described a Florida company that is using orange peels to create cannabidiol, or CBD, a non-intoxicating compound also found in cannabis plants.
“You can regulate cannabis all day long, but if you can source your CBD from somewhere else, then the laws don’t actually cover that,” Russell said. “So the great thing about this emerging industry is that there are entrepreneurs involved, and it very much touches on the American spirit. But it also makes it very fast moving.”
The committee’s next hearing will be Aug. 21 in Augusta.
by Ty Tagami | Jul 29, 2025 | Capitol Beat News Service
ATLANTA — Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is initiating a four-year process that could delete the registrations of nearly a quarter million inactive voters.
“Clean voter rolls mean clean elections,” Raffensperger said Tuesday. “My promise to Georgia voters is elections that are free, fair, and fast – and we’re doing just that.”
Raffensperger’s agency will mail notices to 218,951 registered voters who have not participated since 2019. They will be scrubbed from the rolls in 2029 if they fail to respond by mail or by going online to update their status, and if they do not vote in either the 2026 or 2028 general elections.
(Voters can update their registration at the agency’s Online Voter Registration portal and My Voter Page, where they can also check whether they appear on the inactive list.)
The elections agency will soon roll out an address verification tool for use during registration.
Raffensperger has been trying to shore up confidence in Georgia’s election process, which has come under heavy criticism from supporters of President Donald Trump, who claimed without evidence that he lost the 2020 election due to cheating in Georgia.
Toward that end, Raffensperger also announced that a hand count of 282 “batches” of ballots in the recent Democratic primary runoff for the Georgia Public Service Commission had confirmed Peter Hubbard’s win over Keisha Sean Waites for District 3.
A batch comparison is one of several methods of auditing election results. It involves a comparison of hand count subtotals from identifiable batches of votes, such as from precincts, against the digital count, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
A batch comparison differs from a ballot-level count, which involves comparing randomly selected ballots to the results recorded by machines.
Georgia’s PSC runoff hand count varied from the machine count by two votes out of 13,917 cast. The inconsistency occurred in two of the batches and was within the “expected margin of human variation” and did not affect the outcome, Raffensperger’s office said.
